I think it’s fairly obvious that the entirety of the Taken franchise has been coasting of the first film’s only, genuine, iconic moment. You all know the one, it’s the bit where the admittedly scary Bryan Mills, somehow became even more threatening after delivering a testicle withering threat down a phone to the sex traffickers on the other end. It’s been the dragon the Luc Besson scripted series has been chasing ever since and I think it’s safe to say that there hasn’t been a moment that even comes close to matching it since. This fact is only made more apparent when you watch Taken 3, the final installment that not only sets off alarm bells when no one actually ends up being taken, but also stretches the very concept to beyond breaking point as the filmmakers feel that Mills needed a hefty send off.
What follows is pretty painful – both for any scumbags who a foolish enough to get within grasping distance of Liam Neeson’s mitts and anyone hoping that the Taken series manages to end on a high note. Take it away, Bryan.
Bryan Mills is still the intense, details obsessed OCD guy he’s always been, but he’s trying, goddammit. However, while his attempt to celebrate his daughters birthday a few days early in a clumsy attempt to be spontaneous falls a little flat, both Kim and his ex-wife Lenore still recognise that he’s putting the work in and his former spouse has been using his shoulder to cry on as her crumbling marriage to Stuart St. John continues to cause her distress. In fact, matters have gotten so strained, the wealthy businessman even comes to Bryan’s apartment to insist that he stops meeting with Lenore in order to salvage the marriage despite the fact that Mills is intimidating as fuck.
However, it all becomes a moot point when Lenore’s body turns up at Bryan’s place with her throat slit and then the cops turn up to bring Bryan to justice – but after he lays some of that martial arts whammy on the LAPD, the ex-CIA officer goes on the run to clear his name and lay some more pain to whomever was responsible. However, due to the fact that he’s now a wanted man, Mills now has driven Detective Dotzler on his trail who seems as meticulous and details focus as his quarry and immediately does that whole Tommy Lee Jones thing from The Fugitive in order to whip his men into shape.
Meanwhile, after escaping arrest, setting up a safe house and managing to contact Kim in order to assure her that he’ll bring Lenore’s killer to justice, Bryan starts his investigation while running rings around his pursuers and avoiding certain doom. However, what do Russian gangsters have to do with a seemingly random murder and how much killing and torturing will Bryan have to do in order to bludgeon, shoot and waterboard his way to the truth before Dotzler catches up with him?
Despite some weird moments where things weirdly got a little sexist or racist, the first Taken bet the farm on Liam Neeson’s undeniable presence as he tore his way through a cabal of sex traffickers while growling virtually every line he had like a leather jacketed attack dog. A sequel was an pbvious no brainer, but as the second adventure unfolded, it became pretty obvious that Luc Besson’s script had pretty much ran out of ideas the moment the first film ended despite flipping the script on who got taken this time. However, if the idea well for the Taken movies had run dry by the second film, prospects wasn’t exactly looking rosy for a third and while some scoffed at the news that the third film would take place in Los Angeles despite the globe spanning nature of the franchise, more guffawed at teaser posters that stylised the title as Tak3n, which is n3v3r r3ally a good sign b3for3 a film has 3v3n b33n r3l3as3d (OK, that’s enough of that).
As expected, Taken 3 is so devoid of originality, at times it doesn’t so much feel like a real film as some sort of tax exemption that’s taken the form of a full length movie. So lazy and unimaginative is the script, it genuinely thinks that bringing back Famke Janssen only to “fridge” the shit out of her to fashion it’s wafer-thin plot is actually an innovative twist even though it’s stunningly disrespectful treatment for a woman who not only played an extraordinarily memorable Bond villain, but also one of the X-Men too. From then on it’s once again a fairly standard chase movie where no one actually gets taken due to an apparent request from Neeson himself who presumably was hoping it would mean he’d have to run so much, but while the previous films kept things mercifully brief by barely clocking in over ninety minutes, Taken 3 is around ten minutes short of two hours and you feel every second as it frantically scrambles to fill the time.
Casting Forest Whitaker as the cop on Bryan’s trail seemed like a casting coup, especially as it meant he might start acting like his character of Lieutenant Jon Kavanagh from The Shield, but the actor ends up being as wasted as much as Janssen and doesn’t have much to do except bark orders and claim he’d figured it all out at the end of the film by rambling on about bagels. Maggie Grace is fairly well served as one of action’s most put-upon daughters, but Dougray Scott is done absolutely no favours at all by playing a role originally played by Xander Berkeley in the first film and probably had been utterly forgotten.
And then there’s Neeson.
Look, the man has managed to fashion an impressive action/thriller career in this later section of his career and while some entries have certainly been better than others (for example, A Walk Among The Tombstones was a notable high point), you can tell that the man who has played everyone from a Jedi to Zeus is noticeably slowing down to a point that even the irritating and frenzied editing style of director Olivier Megaton can’t cover for him. Be it a punch, a block, a jump or even a sprint, all the growling line delivery in the world can’t disguise the fact that the actor’s creaking joints and advancing age simply can’t keep up with the demands of the script – even when beating one of his foes into oblivion while they’re wearing their underpants.
However, the real villain here (aside from Besson’s writing) is Megaton unfeasibly flat direction that takes such potentially awesome sequences as Bryan driving a car down a lift shaft in a highly unorthodox escape attempt or the moment where he cripples a jet from taking off by driving through one of its wheels and makes them confusingly boring. This would be the third action sequel scripted by Besson in a row that the director has managed to fumble after Taken 2 and Transporter 3 and I think at this point Megaton needs to change his surname by deed poll to something that matches his action skills more accurately.
But look on the bright side; at least Bryan has finally hung up his scary phone voice once and for all and the main thing this franchise has repeatedly taken is the piss.
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